As a part of its anniversary celebration in 2004, the Chicago International Film Festival presented a "Flashback" series of films to represent forty years of premieres, favorites and discoveries. The selection for this series of the Iranian film The Cow, a 1971 CIFF prizewinner, marks not only a signal film — perhaps the signal film — of the "Iranian New Cinema" but also the key role played by the Chicago festival in helping launch that film renaissance. The Cow had been caught in the Shah's doublebind: the Iranian dictator was very conscious of his country's global profile and wanted to encourage a national cinema, yet he was loathe to allow the nation he was modernizing at gunpoint to be represented by a film depicting simple village life, warts and all. The regime interfered with this project from the start and confiscated the film upon completion. But a print was smuggled to the 1971 Venice Film Festival, where it became a hit, allowing it to make the rounds of other festivals, including Chicago, where the film won a Silver Hugo. International acclaim forced a limited release in Iran, with explosive effect. A public accustomed to schlocky products of a derivative local film industry was suddenly confronted with the possibility of a truly Iranian cinema, along with images that became cultural icons. The film was consistently voted "Best Iranian Film" in an annual critics' poll in the years that followed. But even more significant was the effect of The Cow upon a new generation of Iranian filmmakers who, inspired by the film's lyric realism, at last began to channel an ancient culture's traditional poetic sensibilities into film. By the middle of the next decade, those filmmakers had created a powerful national cinema that had the eager attention of the world.

Interestingly, the director of The Cow had good deal of formal grounding in and appreciation for Western culture. Dariush Mehrjui (b. 1939) studied film at UCLA in the early 1960s, but — being more interested in content than form — he switched to philosophy, where he got his degree. Mehrjui would always be a very literary director, going on to adapt or feature works of Western literature and philosophy in his films. He also loved European cinema, and was conscious that Iran had not yet produced a great film that aspired to capture the essence of his people's character and experience. In only his second feature, Mehrjui drew upon his love of Italian Neo-realism in seeking to find and present the heart of rural village life, but in a way that yielded multiple levels of meaning: social, psychological, political and even metaphysical. The neo-realist insistance on faithful attention to the particular became, once again, an avenue to artful reflection upon the universal.

The Shah had insisted, for its limited release in Iran, that The Cow run with a disclaimer saying the story took place many years in the past. Well it might have, for the film presents village life unchanged from time immemorial. The neo-realist influence is evident from the start in close shots of real peasants in a poor village, whose only cow is owned by a man named Hassan — though "owned" conveys the wrong impression. Hassan's relationship to the cow is an unforgettable picture of a loving friendship between fellow creatures. Hassan lovingly washes, waters and feeds his cow, throughout treating it like a dear friend and speaking to the animal in an easy and constant flow of mumbles, pops and laughter. Au Hasard Balthasar springs to mind as a film with an animal at such a vital emotional core — though in that case the focus was on the suffering of the poor beast. There's heartbreaking suffering here, too, but it is the Job-like experience of Hassan who — for better and worse — so identifies himself with his cow that at its highpoint he can cry out to God, "Come help your cow!" and be referring to himself. The performance of Ezzatollah Entezami as Hassan won him a Silver Hugo in Chicago, and he went on to become a key figure in the director's stock company of actors.


It's really not much of a spoiler to reveal that Hassan's beloved cow dies unexpectedly and Hassan suffers a breakdown; that much is usually covered in any one-line description of the film. But just as Hassan's relationship with his cow is much more than just a matter of mere ownership, so his breakdown is more than just one man's grief over a devastating personal loss. The situation, in fact, serves to create a framework for exploring not just Hassan's psyche, but interlayered dimensions that range from social to political and beyond. Dariush Mehrjui's naturalism often tends to push in the direction of symbolism or allegory to varying degrees, but in The Cow the director hits upon a magical balance between styles that creates space for all sorts of mythic resonances and possible interpretations.

Mehrjui has said he was out to capture the essence of Iranian village life; and like David Lynch, he has a clear eye for what G. K. Chesterton called "the sunny and shady sides of Main Street." On the sunny side, village life is about community. The local Chief rebukes a bully for teasing the village idiot — "Who will take care of him if something happens?" — raising the question that is answered when something happens to Hassan. Indeed, we see the whole village, more than once, come running to the side of those in need, to comfort and encourage, and to work together to solve problems. For just as Hassan identifies with his cow, the whole village identifies with Hassan: his problem is their problem, and soothing his pain soothes their own. Unfortunately, the way they decide to soothe that pain is by lying to Hassan about what happened to his cow. So community, too, has its sunny and shady sides, and simple village life is revealed as not so simple after all.

The dark side of village life — often literalized as nighttime scenes accompanied by a horror-film turn in the soundtrack — also includes the "traditional values" of superstition and xenophobia. The fear of outsiders in The Cow is focussed mainly on the neighboring district of Bolour. In fact, "the Bolouris" are spoken of in ways insiders everywhere have always stereotyped the Other: they're heathens, killers, thieves. The Bolouris are blamed for anything wrong that happens to man or beast. There are rumblings that "something must be done" about the Bolouris. Yet against this common human impulse, this film locates darkness not just "out there," but also "in here": a character we see only in night scenes, Hassani, is quite practiced in crimes routinely ascribed to Bolouris. Meanwhile, the inner darkness is intensified by a black superstition, as a scowling hag hovers over the village, seeing all and leading the village in various rituals aimed at warding off the Evil Eye. And while Modernity has its cold and abstract side, it also includes rationality: villager Saffar is a bully whose callous behavior is blamed on the fact that he's been to the city, yet he's also the one who questions the logic of lying to Hassan and blaming everything on the Bolouris. So even the dark side has a light side in Mehrjui's resolute pursuit of every side to his story.


An awareness of at least two sides to every story is a hallmark for Mehrjui — even a burden; as a director schooled in the West, Mehrjui has been especially attuned to both sides of the old conflict between city and country, clearly overlaid for him with the contrast between Iran and the West. His career after The Cow seems both driven and affected by the multiple worlds he has tried to occupy. Mehrjui tried to continue working under the Shah's schizoid policy of support and banning, then bounced himself between the West and Iran as his nation swerved violently into Islamic Revolution. It is said that a viewing of The Cow converted the Ayatollah Khomeini from a traditional Muslim resistance to cinema to a believer in the "educational" possibilities of film; it took further convincing before the clerics were to allow film directors to go back to being artists and not propagandists. But by the mid-1980s, the way was opened for the first blossoming of the New Iranian Cinema. The pressing need to navigate the Islamic Production Code had actually helped create a national cinema that took the film world by surprise, and even by storm.

Yet despite having helped launch this new cinema with The Cow, Dariush Mehrjui has not always been mentioned prominently among the rising generation of Iranian filmmakers. "We Iranian filmmakers," says Mehrjui, "are like trapeze artists swinging back and forth without a net" — but perhaps some more than others, and not just filmmakers but Iran itself: Mehrjui's gift and burden has been to identify — in some ways like Hassan identified with his cow — with a nation rivven by an endless identity crisis. It's no coincidence that the film which announced Mehrjui that had finally hit his stride after decades of working amid upheaval was Hamoun, a Fellini-esque comedy (it has been described as Mehrjui's 8 ½) of colliding identities: the conflict between traditional and globalized Iran climaxes simultaneously with the title character's artistic, marital, metaphysical, and mid-life crises. The film provoked a powerful national resonance: Hamoun finally knocked The Cow from the Number One spot on the annual list of Best Iranian Films.

Dariush Mehrjui has continued to be a force in Iranian cinema and society, especially with his 1990s' series of realist social dramas on the plight of women under the Islamic Republic. He's also offered up the bittersweet musings of an aging and overlooked filmmaker in the autobiographical The Pear Tree (1998) and in the ne'r-do-well cinephile of Mamma's Guests (2003), who sighs wistfully that he gave everything he had to the cinema, even though the cinema was never as faithful to him in return. Mehrjui lost another chance for the cinema to give something back when he was unable to get a visa and so couldn't attend CIFF's special screening of The Cow. Mehrjui has faced restrictions and that maddening combination of support-and-rejection his entire career; no doubt his lifelong path between conflicting worlds and absurd contradictions will continue to help him keep his balance — not to mention his sense of humor and humanity — through difficulty and disappointment. The greater loss would seem to be that of America, which has now managed to deny entry and/or manhandle three major Iranian directors. Abbas Kiarostami was kept from attending the premiere of his film Ten at the 2002 New York Film Festival, and Jafar Panahi's treatment by US Immigration officials included being chained for several hours to a bench when he refused to submit to what was essentially racial profiling. Superstition and xenophobia are truly universal, whether the Other is named "the Great Satan," "the Axis of Evil," or the Bolouris. The Cow's story of communal darkness and light, with its reminder of the good and bad that tragedy might inspire, was never more relevant.

FIRST RUN FEATURES has recently released The Cow and Hamoun on DVD, each with film notes by Godfrey Cheshire and The Cow includes an interview with director Dariush Mehrjui. First Run Features also distributes the Mehrjui film, Leila.